Most rankings of where to buy tell you where houses are cheap. That is not the same question as where a first time buyer with limited savings can actually get in and stay in.
This index asks the second question, and it answers it by throwing away every listing that fails a livability or financing test before any ranking happens.
Most coverage of the affordability crisis says owning is out of reach, and most gurus say it is easy; this index is the middle path, built from listing data, summarized per metro in a file you can download and check (the 23,424 individual listings are not included).
I screened 23,424 listings for two to four unit buildings across 83 metro areas. 11,495 failed no test: missing data passes, so a survivor was not necessarily measured on all seven. On the metro figures those survivors produce, 11 metros clear the affordability bar at a 6.66% mortgage rate.
Best metros to house hack in 2026
Rochester, New York ranks first at a $160,000 entry price, keeping $563 a month against renting. Of 23,424 listings screened across 83 metro areas, only 11 metros qualified at the 6.66% mortgage rate.
Ranked by a weighted score across three groups: how hard the metro is to enter, what the monthly economics look like once you own, and whether the place is likely to hold up. Entry price is the 25th percentile surviving listing. Kept per month is what stays in your pocket against renting on the median surviving deal, the survivor at or near the middle when a metro’s survivors are ranked by that monthly figure rather than by price, counting the rent you no longer pay plus what tenants pay, less the full payment and a maintenance reserve.[S1]
| # | Metro | Entry price | Typical price | Kept per month | Listings | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rochester, NY | $160,000 | $234,900 | $563 | 87 | 64.9 |
| 2 | Syracuse, NY | $198,000 | $240,000 | $716 | 92 | 63.9 |
| 3 | Albany, NY | $269,900 | $299,900 | $558 | 69 | 60.3 |
| 4 | Cleveland, OH | $169,997 | $210,000 | $333 | 62 | 53.7 |
| 5 | Youngstown, OH THIN | $127,500 | $190,000 | $234 | 14 | 48.3 |
| 6 | Pittsburgh, PA | $249,000 | $319,900 | $163 | 266 | 46.6 |
| 7 | Buffalo, NY | $237,900 | $284,900 | $241 | 240 | 43.8 |
| 8 | Toledo, OH | $134,900 | $150,000 | -$50 | 40 | 39.3 |
| 9 | Chicago, IL | $449,000 | $550,000 | $184 | 366 | 37.3 |
| 10 | Grand Rapids, MI | $279,000 | $352,000 | -$103 | 51 | 34.2 |
| 11 | Memphis, TN THIN | $160,000 | $173,000 | -$21 | 16 | 33.9 |
Note added 23 September 2026: every row is from the August 2026 edition at the 6.66% rate, so a city page re-run since then can show slightly different figures. Buffalo has also been re-run with RentCafe’s published one-bedroom rent ($1,301, updated August 31, 2026), and the current Buffalo figures are on the Buffalo page.
Metros marked THIN rest on fewer than 20 surviving listings, so their entry price could move a long way next month. They are shown rather than hidden, with their listing count beside them.
How the Foothold Index screens listings
Seven absolute tests remove listings before any metro is scored, covering price floors, FHA ceilings, condition and neighbourhood crime. Missing data always passes: a listing is never removed by a number the model does not have.
Seven tests run on every listing before a metro is scored.
| Test | A listing fails when | Why the test exists |
|---|---|---|
| Price floor | Priced below $60,000 | At that price a two to four unit building is a shell, or effectively a land sale |
| FHA ceiling | List price above the metro’s FHA loan limit for that unit count. The limit caps the base loan, not the price, so this test is conservative: at 3.5% down a listing up to about 3.6% above the limit could still be financed. | A building a first-time buyer cannot finance is not a first-time buyer deal |
| Condition floor | Under $40 per square foot | The price is telling you the building has been written off. Gut rehab runs $60 to $100 or more per square foot |
| Yield ceiling | Gross yield above 25% | Usually a repair bill wearing a rent number. Treated here as a warning sign rather than proof of a problem |
| Neighborhood crime | Violent crime above 1.45 times the median American city | Uses FBI city level figures as the anchor, so a bad ZIP cannot pass just by being average for its own metro |
| Abandonment | More than 8% of homes empty for no ordinary reason | Quality is flat below that level and turns sharply above it |
| Value trend | Home values fell more than 15% over five years | A market still falling is not a foothold |
Every test is absolute rather than relative to its own city. A relative screen keeps the cheapest quarter of every metro no matter how bad that quarter is. Missing data always passes: a listing is never removed by a number the model does not have, so a survivor is a listing that failed no test rather than one that cleared all seven.
A metro is then ranked only if its median surviving deal costs no more than renting plus 10%, and the payment fits inside a 48.5% debt to income ceiling. A metro with a single surviving listing is not ranked however it scores: that is Detroit, which clears both tests on one building.
Which metros just missed the ranking
Seven metros cleared the listing tests but failed at metro level on payment to income or the affordability gap. New Orleans, New York and Hartford all came out with negative keep ratios, meaning owning cost more than renting.
These cleared the listing level tests but failed at the metro level. Keep ratio is what you keep as a share of a month of rent: zero means owning costs the same as renting.
| Metro | Keep ratio | Why it did not rank |
|---|---|---|
| New Orleans, LA | -0.012 | the payment is too large for local incomes |
| New York, NY | -0.096 | the payment is too large for local incomes |
| Fort Wayne, IN | -0.188 | owning costs more than renting by more than the model allows |
| Harrisburg, PA | -0.234 | owning costs more than renting by more than the model allows |
| Allentown, PA | -0.372 | owning costs more than renting by more than the model allows |
| Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA | -0.408 | owning costs more than renting by more than the model allows |
| Hartford, CT | -0.461 | owning costs more than renting by more than the model allows |
What this ranking cannot tell you
It cannot judge the condition of an individual building, the cost of flood insurance, or how a purchase actually turns out. Five metros carry only one rent series rather than two: Bakersfield, Rochester, Scranton, Syracuse and Youngstown.
- Whether any specific building is a good buy. This works on asking prices and modeled rents and has never seen the inside of anything.
- Condition, beyond a crude price per square foot test. In Chicago, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids and several other metros the listing feed carried no square footage, so that test could not run at all.
- Flood insurance costs. It is a separate policy, it is not modeled in any metro here, and in high risk areas it can add thousands a year.
- Anything about outcomes. There is no data anywhere in this model on whether a purchase actually went well.
- Five metros carry only one rent series rather than two, so their most important input has no second source checking it: Bakersfield, Rochester, Scranton, Syracuse and Youngstown.
The settings above are choices, and moving them moves the answer. Lowering the affordability bar admits more metros quickly. Raising the crime multiplier lets cheaper listings through in rougher neighborhoods, which pulls entry prices down for the wrong reason. Nothing here is hidden: every threshold is printed above.
How to use this ranking
Start with the metros your savings can actually reach, then run the numbers on specific listings using the free calculators and the per-metro pages.
Start with a metro that fits your savings, then run your own numbers on a specific building. My free calculators cover the deal math, the metro pages linked below go deeper on individual cities, and what house hacking is covers the strategy from the start.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Foothold Index?
The Foothold Index is defined as a ranking of US metro areas by how realistic it is for a first time buyer with little cash to buy a two to four unit building, live in one unit and rent the others, at a monthly cost no more than 10% above renting. It screens 23,424 listings across 83 metros; 11,495 of those listings failed no test (missing data passes, so a survivor was not necessarily measured on all seven), and it ranks the 11 metros whose median surviving deal clears the affordability bar; in 8 of those metros the owner comes out ahead of renting.
What does house hacking mean?
House hacking is defined as buying a building with two to four units, living in one of them, and renting out the rest so that tenant rent covers most or all of the mortgage payment. Living in the building is what allows a buyer to use an FHA loan with 3.5% down instead of the larger deposit an investment property requires.
How much cash do you need to buy a duplex with an FHA loan?
Cash needed at closing is defined as the 3.5% deposit plus about 2.8% in closing costs, less any down payment assistance the buyer qualifies for. Applied to the entry prices in the table above, that is roughly $8,000 on the cheapest metro listed and about $28,000 on the most expensive, before any assistance.
Which metro ranks first in 2026?
Rochester, NY ranks first, with an entry price of $160,000 and a median deal that leaves about $563 a month in the buyer’s pocket compared with renting (August 2026 edition, at a 6.66% rate). Syracuse produces the largest monthly figure, and the two differ because the ranking also weighs how hard a metro is to enter and whether it is likely to hold up.
What does entry price mean?
Entry price is defined as the 25th percentile surviving listing in a metro: the cheap end of what failed none of the livability and financing tests. It is a real asking price on a real building rather than an average, and it is not the cheapest listing on the market.
Why do so few metros qualify in 2026?
The limiting factor is defined by the mortgage rate rather than by prices alone. At the 6.66% model rate (August 2026 edition), 11 of 83 metros clear the affordability test. Run the same 23,424 listings at the roughly 3% rates available in 2021 and 27 clear it. The buildings did not change.
Sources and vintage. Listings from Realtor.com. Rents: the metro one-bedroom rent is the average of Zumper and Apartment List asking rents (May to July 2026), scaled per ZIP by HUD Small Area Fair Market Rents FY2026 relative to the metro FMR. Median household income from the US Census American Community Survey 2024 one-year estimates; rental vacancy is the Census Housing Vacancy Survey state rate for every metro; other-vacant share from the American Community Survey 2023. Crime from FBI Table 8 and CrimeGrade. Home value trend from the Zillow Home Value Index. FHA limits from HUD CY2026. Mortgage rate 6.66% from the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, week ending 30 July 2026.
Data as of 2026-08-06. Released under a CC BY 4.0 license: use it with attribution to Van to Vault.
Download the full dataset
All 83 metros are published as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, with a permanent DOI at 10.5281/zenodo.22019647.
Every figure behind this index is downloadable: all 83 metros with entry and typical prices, surviving-listing counts, monthly keep versus renting, and the ranked scores. It is free under a CC BY 4.0 license – use any of it with attribution to Van to Vault. Data as of 2026-08-06.
Download the CSV · Download the JSON
Archived with a permanent DOI so it can be cited in academic and policy work: 10.5281/zenodo.22019647. Suggested citation: VanToVault, Foothold Index: rent-vs-own screen for two-to-four unit homes across 83 US metros, 2026. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22019647
My public datasets, with licenses, DOIs and citation lines, are listed together on the open data page.
How the screen works, step by step, is published as a citable methods note: 10.5281/zenodo.23070347.
The full report for every metro
Each metro page carries the entry price, the monthly economics, the local reporting checks and the risks. The dataset covers all 83 metros, ranked and unranked.
Each metro has its own page with the entry price, the monthly numbers, what independent local reporting says about the model’s answer, and the risks to carry into a viewing.
Ranked
#1 Rochester, NY#2 Syracuse, NY#3 Albany, NY#4 Cleveland, OH#5 Youngstown, OH#6 Pittsburgh, PA#7 Buffalo, NY#8 Toledo, OH#9 Chicago, IL#10 Grand Rapids, MI#11 Memphis, TN
Screened, but does not clear the bar
Akron, OHScranton, PASt. Louis, MOMilwaukee, WI
Clears the bar on one surviving listing, too few to rank
The other 67 metros, screened but not ranked: every metro in the dataset now has its own page with prices, rents, the monthly cost at seven rates, income needed, FHA limits and down payment help.
- Albuquerque NM
- Allentown PA
- Atlanta GA
- Austin TX
- Bakersfield CA
- Baltimore MD
- Baton Rouge LA
- Birmingham AL
- Boston MA
- Bridgeport CT
- Cape Coral-Fort Myers FL
- Charleston SC
- Charlotte NC
- Cincinnati OH
- Columbus OH
- Dallas TX
- Dayton OH
- Denver CO
- El Paso TX
- Fort Wayne IN
- Fresno CA
- Greensboro NC
- Harrisburg PA
- Hartford CT
- Houston TX
- Indianapolis IN
- Jacksonville FL
- Kansas City MO
- Knoxville TN
- Lakeland FL
- Las Vegas NV
- Los Angeles CA
- Louisville KY
- McAllen TX
- Miami FL
- Minneapolis MN
- Nashville TN
- New Orleans LA
- New York NY
- North Port-Sarasota FL
- Oklahoma City OK
- Omaha NE
- Orlando FL
- Oxnard CA
- Philadelphia PA
- Phoenix AZ
- Portland ME
- Portland OR
- Providence RI
- Raleigh NC
- Richmond VA
- Riverside-San Bernardino
- Sacramento CA
- Salt Lake City UT
- San Antonio TX
- San Diego CA
- San Francisco CA
- San Jose CA
- Seattle WA
- Spokane WA
- Tampa FL
- Tucson AZ
- Tulsa OK
- Virginia Beach-Norfolk VA
- Washington DC
- Wichita KS
- Worcester MA
What a rate cut would change: the same screen re-run at every quarter point from 5.00% to 7.50% is in Mortgage rates vs. renting: where a duplex wins at each rate. At the 6.66% model rate (week ending 30 July 2026) 8 metros keep money; at 6.00% it is 13.
Companion piece
House Hacking at Today’s Mortgage Rates: What Changed, and Where It Still Works – what the move from roughly 3% to 6.66% did to the cost of the same building, and why three of the eleven metros ranked here now run a negative monthly keep.
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Sources
- [S1] Van to Vault, read 24 September 2026: “'$210,000 / Median of surviving listings' and 'The median surviving deal was a 2-unit, 4-bedroom building at $167,000 in ZIP 44119.'” vantovault.com.